The victim in the Hi-Joy murder case was a thirty-one-year-old janitor named Jimmy Smith. It was a brutal crime—occurring long ago. Before Birdy was even born. Yet it resonated with her when she first took her job with Kitsap County. It had been the kind of messy case that brings the victim into the autopsy suite piece by piece. Literally. Jimmy had been killed with a hatchet.
Birdy studied those old crime-scene photos, the imagery of the brutality rendered in gorgeous black and white. She saw the force with which the assailant had struck the victim. She could see he’d been right-handed. That he was taller than the victim. That whoever had killed Jimmy had done so in a rage.
At first authorities suspected a robbery gone wrong—but the till was full and Jimmy’s wallet hadn’t been taken from his jeans pocket. It had long been suspected that the crime scene had been tampered with and that the man behind the murder was the chief of police. The evidence left at the scene was circumstantial at best—a shoe print matched the size of the chief’s. Later his wife told investigators that he’d come home with bloody clothes.
It was the way things were handled at the time. The facts about the chief that had emerged over time were troubling. He’d been the only one to secure the evidence, elements of which swiftly went missing. And later, adding credence to the rumors of his potential involvement, he was convicted some years later of sexual assault and sent to prison.
Birdy wondered about two things as she gave up on the dying and possibly dangerous oven. She wondered why it was that her personal frame of reference for every little thing seemed to tie into murder? It was a bowling alley, a place of smelly shoes, rock and roll, and over-foamed beers. That’s what most people thought. Not her. A park on a sunny day? That’s where a girl had been raped. A shopping center she passed by occasionally in Tacoma? That’s where a little boy went missing before a K-9 team found his body in a culvert two miles from the scene.
She couldn’t answer exactly why it was that she often thought in those terms. Occupational hazard maybe? Sometimes she tossed it all off as something vague, that the tendency to imprint on things in a dark way was just how she was wired. Somehow she always could see the undertones of the grim under the sparkling veneer of pretty.
And the other question that weighed on her mind just then? Exactly what time did the appliance store open the next morning?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hello Deli was one of those restaurants that prided itself on its use of fresh ingredients. Enormous posters of fruits and vegetables misted with water adorned the walls. Brad Nevins and Kendall Stark sat under an image of an eggplant that had to be at least five feet in length.
“I hear the eggplant is good,” Brad said with a smile.
“Really? They have eggplant here?” Kendall smiled back.
A young man named Terry brought them water and ran through the daily specials with the enthusiasm of an undertaker.
“I’ll let you chew on that for a minute,” he said.
Kendall settled on a soup and salad combination, and Brad decided a meatball sub would hit the spot.
“Chelsea Hyatt owns this place?” Kendall asked.
“Yeah. Though it’s not Hyatt anymore. She’s had a few husbands. No. 3, I think. Last name is Morgan.”
“She and Brenda knew each other quite well,” Kendall said.
“Yep. Thick as thieves, those two. Probably accurate in every way.”
“Grew up together?” Kendall asked.
“Nope. Supposedly met after Joey and Brenda got married. Brenda was working at the front desk at the Allstate office on 3rd and Chelsea was some kind of an aspiring agent—though she had a clerical job too.”
Terry came back, and they ordered.
“Anything to drink?” he asked.
“Water’s fine,” Kendall said.
“I’ll take a beer. Mac and Jack’s if you have it on tap.”
“We do. Twenty-two ounce or sixteen?”
“Sixteener.”
As they waited for their food, Kendall caught a glimpse of Chelsea. She was a ketchup-colored redhead with cat-eye glasses and distressed jeans. It was either the look of a hipster or the look of a woman who raided her aunt’s closet.
“Chelsea never testified at trial, did she?” Kendall asked.
Brad shook his head. “Nope. She disappeared right after the murders. Went to St. Croix or some paradise like that. Laid low. Came back here long after the dust settled.”
“They really wanted to find her,” Kendall said.
“Yeah, they did,” Brad said. “But they didn’t. And I guess they didn’t need her after all. Got a conviction. That’s all that mattered.”
The food came. The soup looked good. It was a broccoli cheese concoction with freshly made sourdough croutons for crunch. The salad, however, was a sad affair. All limp iceberg lettuce and carrot shavings. The meatball sub was the superior choice, but not the kind of thing Kendall would eat while conducting an interview about a criminal case. Sauce on the front of her blouse would evoke blood spatter.
And that wouldn’t be good at all.
“She didn’t do any media, did she?”
He picked at his food. “Chelsea said she had nothing to tell, but I think she was scared about what she knew.”
Kendall set down her fork. Good-bye Deli would be a better name for the restaurant.
“How come you think that?” she said.
“She sent us a sympathy card right after Joe and Kara’s funeral. She added a note to the standard ‘thinking of you at this difficult time’ imprint. It said something along the lines of ‘I’m personally sorry for your loss.’”
“Personally?”
“Yeah,” Brad said, while chomping on his sub. “Weird, huh?”
“Very.”
“Elise ran into her after she came back to town. It was here. She opened up this place. Elise said that Chelsea told her that she didn’t mean anything by using the word ‘personally’ and that she’d used it just to emphasize that she was sorry for the pain we were going through.”
Interesting.
“Did you know her?” Kendall asked.
“She was in Joey’s class. We’d run into her over the years at school events, but no, for someone who was ‘personally’ sorry, she sure didn’t have much of a connection to us.”
Kendall finished her soup, which was ten times better than the salad, and got up.
“I’m going to see if she’ll talk to me,” she said.
“Good luck,” he said. “She’s pretty buttoned up. Hasn’t said a word about Brenda that I know about. Never been in the papers. Or TV. Radio silence, that one.”
* * *
Chelsea Morgan indeed was a hipster. She had not raided her aunt’s closet. As she leaned over the computer behind the counter, a feather tattoo on her shoulder caught the light.
Definitely a hipster’s move.
“Chelsea?” Kendall asked.
Chelsea turned around. “Is everything all right with your meal?”
“Oh yes,” Kendall said, knowing that there was no point